Streets of Death - Dell Shannon (21 page)

"Phil thinks it’s so funny," said
Landers. "Saying I’ll have to break down and buy a new one,
and my God, it isn’t that I’m stingy, but the payments--"

"Get a Gremlin," said Glasser. "You’ll
get damn good mileage."

"I know, I know, I’ve driven Phil’s."

"Oh, Sergeant Hackett! Listen, I gotta make you
believe me this time, they’re--"

"Oh, for the love of God!" said Hackett
disgustedly. Mr. Yeager had plunged through the doorway with Sergeant
Lake in pursuit.

"You’ve gotta listen, they’re gonna do it
tonight, they’re gonna murder that woman! I heard ’em planning
just how to do it, they’re gonna hit her on the head and put her in
the bathtub and make it look like an accident, like she slipped and
fell, and--"

"Now, Mr. Yeager," said Hackett. "If
you’re going to tell me you were in the hall again and the door was
open, don’t. Why don’t you just try to forget about it--"

"--And the girl’s going off after she’s
helped him, see, nobody knows he’s got a girl, his ma, Mis’
Lampert, she’s kind of jealous of him--and then he’l1 pretend to
find her and act all sorry and cry and carry on--"

"Now listen, Mr. Yeager. Just calm down. Try to
explain to me just how you heard all this. You know you can’t.
You’re just imagining--"

Yeager took a step back, licking his lips and looking
in despair between Hackett and Lake. Then he said sullenly, "Oh,
hell. Well--well, if you gotta know, I--I got the place bugged."

"What?" said Hackett. Landers laughed.

"I--well, hell, I don’t have much to do,
nights," said Yeager weakly. "I took a course in
electronics once. I-I did it first, we had a couple sets of newlyweds
in the place--" Lake and Glasser began to laugh helplessly. "And
it was kind of interesting, and--well--well," said Yeager half
defensively, "it was, you know, kind of like picking a channel
on TV--"

"What the hell’s going on here?" asked
Mendoza, coming across the hall to find all his available staff
convulsed with merriment and Yeager standing in the middle looking
miserable.

Hackett pulled himself together and told him, and
Mendoza began to laugh too. "It’s not so funny!" said
Yeager. "It was--you coulda knocked me over, I heard ’em talk
about it the first time--and damn it, I tried to get you to believe
me, so you’d stop ’em, but you wouldn’t pay no attention! And I
knew I hadda do something, so I--I got all the rest of it down on
tape. The other times they talked." He reached into his pocket
and produced three cheap sixty-minute tape cassettes. "Now you
gotta believe it!"

"Well, I will be Goddamned!" said Hackett.
"If this isn’t one for the books--you mean that
innocent-looking fellow is really-- Damnation, and we’ll have to do
something about it." He looked at his watch. "I’d better
call Angel. Luis?"

"
I wouldn’t miss
hearing those tapes for a million bucks," Mendoza said,
grinning.

* * *

The tapes would make excellent evidence; this would
be one trial that wouldn’t cost much time or money. They went out
with Piggott and Schenke to surprise the quarry, and they did.
Mendoza had laughed over Mr. Yeager’s homemade entertainment; and
in the course of twenty-six years at this sordid job, he had seen
violence and blood, tragedy and death, brutality and mayhem of all
sorts, but he wouldn’t soon forget the look on Mrs. Lampert’s
face as she listened to what they knew, how they knew it. Looking
from them to her son--a little too good-looking, Edward Lampert, with
a weak chin and pale eyes--she aged twenty years in a moment.
Expectably, he blustered and was sullen in turns, but finally parted
with the girl’s name, Diane Ashley, and her address. Hackett went
to add her to the party, and collected some fingernail scratches to
match Piggott’s.

They ended up at the jail at eleven o’clock,
booking them in.

"But you know, Mr. Yeager," Hackett had
said before that, "you’ll really have to remove all the bugs.
Apart from anything else, it’s invasion of privacy."

"I guess so,"
said Yeager. He sighed deeply. "I’m sorry it had to come to
that, I hadda tell you, get you to believe me. But I guess I better.
But you just got no idea, Sergeant Hackett--it was interesting as
hell!"

* * *

About two o’clock that morning Patrolmen Zimmerman
and O’Neill were handed a call to a disturbance on Alvarado. When
they got to it, they found an interested little crowd, mostly black,
around a couple outside an all-night restaurant, beside a car at the
curb.

"You take him in and lock him up!" the
woman shouted at them as they got out of the car. "He tried to
kill me! Tried to strangle me!" She was a young woman, not
bad-looking and decently dressed. They calmed her down and she gave
them a name, Ruby Blake. "I just stopped in that place, have a
bite to eat before I go home after work--I work at a rest home, night
shift. He got talking, acted all nice and polite, and offered me a
ride home. And then when I got in his car, he started fooling around
and tried to strangle me!" She was crying then, and she opened
her coat to show them a couple of darkening bruises.

They couldn’t get anything out of the man at all.
He was light-skinned, clean-shaven, about thirty: looked ordinary. He
just looked at them sullenly and wouldn’t answer questions. They
looked in the car and it didn’t have any registration, so they
called in the plate-number. It had been reported stolen in Beverly
Hills that afternoon.

"Would you make a statement charging him, Miss
Blake?" asked Zimmerman.

"I surely would! You just tell me where to do
it. Treat a decent girl like that--"

"It’ll be assault with intent," said
O’Neill. "Robbery-Homicide."

"The night watch has
gone by now. Leave a report with the main desk," said Zimmerman,
"and stash him in jail." They called the garage to tow the
car in and put him in cuffs and drove down to the Alameda facility.
He never said a word all the way.

* * *

The day watch had hardly come in, on Thursday
morning, when there was a heist reported at a drugstore on Spring
Street. Galeano went out on it, and the pharmacist gave him a good
description. He was so mad, he said he’d come over right now and
look at mug-shots. He did, and within tive minutes of the time Phil
Landers had settled him down with a book, he picked one. "That’s
him!" he told Galeano positively. "I’d know him anywhere,
that ugly mug! He didn’t even have a hat on, I’d know him in the
dark!"

It was a picture of one Adam O’Hara, and he had the
right record for the job: two counts of armed robbery and a few other
things. There was a fairly recent address, and Galeano went looking
for him. It was a small apartment on Sunset Avenue, and he got no
answer to his ring, but the door across the hall opened and a
nice-looking little gray-haired woman asked, "Are you looking
for the O’Haras?"

"That’s right," said Galeano. "Do
you know where Mr. O’Hara is?"

"Why, yes. He’ll still be at the hospital. He
said he’d let me know, but it’s a first baby and I expect she’ll
be some time. What? Oh, it’s the French Hospital. He was so
worried, poor boy, I had to call the doctor for him."

Galeano went over to the French Hospital and
discovered Adam O’Hara in beaming transports over a fine boy, nine
pounds three ounces, born twenty minutes before. A whole staff of
nurses, nurses’ aides and other prospective fathers could say that
O’Hara had been there since two o’clock that morning.

Galeano was annoyed, and for some reason he also felt
queerly desolate. Even as Mendoza said about the citizens, They have
eyes and see not. It was likely that the pharmacist, angry and
excited, had mistaken O’Hara’s mugshot for somebody who looked
like him--he wasn’t an unusual type--but Galeano hadn’t any
immediate impulse to browse through the books looking.

It was raining now in a halfhearted sort of way. He
went to have lunch at the Globe Grill, and Marta wasn’t there. He
sat where she would have waited on him, but the buxom dark girl came
up instead. He waited till she brought his order and asked, "Isn’t
Mrs. Fleming here?"

"No, she’s off sick." She hardly looked
at him, didn’t seem to recognize him as one of the cops who had
been here.

Galeano ate his macaroni and cheese, not thinking
much. Come down to it, Carey and the rest of those damned cynics had
done all the thinking on it. All from the old viewpoint, drilled into
any cop as any lawyer, what was the crime, who profited, how was it
done, by whom. Damn it, he felt sorry for her: and maybe he was being
stupid. He could follow the way Mendoza and Carey thought,
logically--and there were questions to be answered about Marta
Fleming. But he found that sometime just in the last couple of hours
he had come back to simple feeling, and what the feeling said was,
that’s an honest girl, telling the truth. And if that was simple in
another sense, the hell with being too smart.

He paid the bill, put on his coat, went out and drove
down to Westlake Avenue. He had to turn to park on the legal side.
The place was quiet except for a faint hint of singing in a
whiskeyish voice, from the top floor. He pushed the bell; pushed it
again. After a while the door was pulled back and she stood there.
She had a navy wool robe belted tightly around her, and her
russet-blonde-tawny hair was uncombed, her nose red.

"Mrs. Fleming--"

"You!" she said. "Police again! Am I
never any more to have peace?"

"
Now listen," said Galeano. "I--"

"Gott im Himmel! Go away!" she said
furiously. "I do not wish to talk to you--is that for you enough
plain language?"

Galeano began to feel slightly irritated. All the
various things the people he’d talked to had said about her slid
past his mind. "If you’d just 1isten--"

"I will not listen to you, stupid pig of a
policeman! Go away!" she said arrogantly.

Galeano, that mild and even-tempered man, quite
suddenly lost his temper. He reached out and took her by the
shoulders and shook her hard, back and forth. "Who’s stupid,
you damned silly woman? It’s no wonder you haven’t made any
friends here, keeping your damned stiff-necked pride, never meeting
people halfway! All I wanted to tell you, damn it, is that I believe
your damned silly story--I think you’re honest--and God forgive me
for maybe being a fool! Now if you want to go on being a Goddamned
martyr, it’s perfectly all right with me, but all I can say is, I
think you’re a bigger Goddamned fool!"

He shook her again and let her go and stepped back.

"Oh!" she said, and for a minute he thought
she was going to hit him, and then she crumpled against the
door-frame and began to cry in great gulping sobs. "But I am not
a martyr--all my fault--because I was weak--and nobody, nobody,
nobody to talk--
sehr einsam, niemand--Ach, die
kleine Kéitzchen, die kleine Kätzchen, aber
--all
my fault--
ach, so richt
,
I cannot talk with people, tell how--" She fell forward,
sobbing, and Galeano caught her in his arms.
 

NINE

HE WAS ALARMED. She was sobbing so hard her whole
body shook, and she made strangling noises in her throat. He half
carried her over to the couch, and she lay huddled over one arm
uttering great gulping sobs. He didn’t know what to do; he’d
never seen anything like it.

"Hey," he said uneasily, "are you all
right? Marta?"

Gradually the sobs lessened in intensity; she shook
with several long shudders, half straightened up, put her face in her
hands, and then after a long moment she ' sniffed, groped in her
pocket for a handkerchief, and blew her nose. She was still shaking a
little, and she said in a muffled voice, "I am ashamed. I am
sorry--to lose control so--"

"Don’t you feel better?" asked Galeano.

She blew her nose again. "Yes, I do," she
said, sounding surprised. "It--it is not easy that I--"

"Everybody needs to let off steam once in a
while," said Galeano. "You just kept it all bottled up too
long."

And surprisingly, Marta suddenly laughed--a wobbly
and half tearful laugh. "You are so very right," she said.
"It has been--what’s the phrase--one damned thing after
another."

Galeano was so relieved he laughed too, uproariously.

"You’d better tell me all about it. Maybe I’d
understand better. You know, what you need right now is a good stiff
drink. It won’t do your cold any harm, either."

"Yes, I have caught a cold. There is a bottle of
brandy, I was going to mix it with some lemon--"

"The hell with the lemon." Galeano went out
to the kitchen, found the brandy, poured her a stiff four fingers
and gave himself a smaller one. "You get
outside that, and if you talk some you’ll feel better yet."

She drank a third of it at once, took a long breath,
shuddered and sat back, closing her eyes. "I am," she said
dreamily, "very tired. I think you are a kind person. You see, I
cannot help but feel it was all my fault--all my fault." She
drank more brandy. Between that and the sudden flood of expended
emotion all her reticences were down, overrun. "Because I never
should have married him. I never loved him as a wife should. It was
wrong. We learn too late."